A Synonym for Regret
by Draikinator
Summary: You fucked up, kid.


The Lost Light stops on a local planet for much needed repairs and resupply, a conspicuously warm land mass that Ratchet warns anyone who goes ashore to be aware of, listing precautions and emergency overheating first aid measures. Rodimus sits through all of it nonchalantly, and it isn't until he's leaning in his Captain's chair, chewing on a datapad stylus and grinning at the local he's buying the medical supplies from that he realizes no one is going to be paying for this requisition. He goes still, biting through the stylus, blue ink dribbling down the corner of his mouth and the local stalls in their haggling, but resumes, no doubt assuming this was as intentional as it was unprovoked, some native cybertronian custom they were unfamiliar with.

Rodimus's audial receptors ring and he needs to reset them twice before he gathers his bearings and informs the local he needs to downsize his purchase. He's alone on the deck and when he switches off the console, an agreement reached, he sits in the dark for twenty minutes before he stands up with a start and runs outside, leaving Ratchet in charge of the ship and going to join the few of the Lost Light's crew who had felt up to visiting the local bars.

It doesn't bother him.

* * *

It's strange to wake up to his own alarm. It's been set for the last year, and it goes off every morning, a cheery song from earth with guitars he likes, but it has never woken him recharge. Occasionally he's woken by one of Magnus's annoyed calls or Ratchet's demands, but Magnus is gone, and Ratchet's temper, as fierce as it had always been, had vanished with the Lost Light's shuttle. He hadn't called in a week.

He stretched when he rose, noting with surprise how tired his joints were, how the tiny pistons in his shoulders and knees faltered just a bit as they opened for the first time of the day.

He stood in silence for a moment before knocking his alarm off the desk and crushing it beneath one pede, then stretching down with a slow exhale to pick up the pieces. His spinal struts stretched tautly, in a way that was reminiscent of the yoga he was usually conned into doing in the mornings, but hadn't in a week, because he couldn't, because he shouldn't.

He's just picking up the pieces. It doesn't bother him.

* * *

The day is waning, the off-shift looming on the horizon of Rodimus's awareness, and he's slashing the cheap, alien sword he bartered for on their last planetside stop alone in the training hall, pushing off automated reminders to deal with paperwork that Magnus would have called him over in a frenzy by now and focusing on the slice of the undersized blade through the air.

It's not heavy enough to give him the heft he's been used to swinging with, and there's no one he can ask for advice from anymore on how to compensate for that.

He buries the shaft in a soft metal target and nearly screams trying to wrench it free, angrier than he realized, tugging and panting before finally he kicks at the stupid thing and it breaks in half, cleanly, the hilt clattering to the floor. Rodimus thinks for a moment he doesn't even like swordplay. He just likes sword fighting lessons.

He kicks the hilt under the table and goes back to his empty habsuite, but he doesn't recharge. It really doesn't bother him, he's just not tired.

* * *

Things are better with Magnus back, but Rodimus still races alone on the planets they land on and he doesn't know how to convince people he wants it that way, because really, he does, it's fine. It really doesn't bother him.

* * *

It doesn't bother him that despite the fact Rodimus stood up at the helm of the major meeting hall and spoke in clear words and a still voice that everything had been his fault, that he'd lied, that a mostly innocent mech had been banished and that he'd made a mistake in not coming clean- it doesn't bother him that that fact didn't change anyone's opinion of their lost crewmember.

Not a single one.

Of course that doesn't bother him.

* * *

Rodimus hates it when people whisper and yawn. He hates it when they lean on their hands in the crowd and stare at him through half shuttered optics, with obviously dialed down audials. It's not his fault he's stumbling through his speeches- he has to improv them, because he's terrible at writing them, and every time he sits down at a databank to prepare one, his tanks churn like he's going to be sick and his fingers shake against the keys.

The only thing that bothers him is their stupid, dull, uninterested stares.

* * *

"Doesn't it bother you?!"

Ratchet's words echo in his mind. Of course it doesn't bother him. If it bothered him, he would have broken by now. If it had bothered him, he wouldn't have been able to write his own speeches and pay his own bills. Of course it didn't bother him. It hadn't been Rodimus's idea or even his fault- he'd volunteered, no, demanded- it wasn't Rodimus's fault.

He hadn't done anything wrong.

It doesn't bother him.

It couldn't bother him.


End file.
